Go to hosting dashboard/content/IIS management and click “create” link. This is an interface GoDaddy provides you to create virtual directory for your ASP.NET application. Give a name for directory and don’t forget to check “set application root” – this is akin to “configure virtual directory as application” in IIS world, and this is exactly what we doing - installing ASP.NET application. More...

This post more accurately should’ve been called "how NOT to migrate to IIS 7". To migrate from IIS 6 to IIS 7 on GoDaddy all you need is to push "upgrade to IIS 7" button in the control panel. Sweet, right? Actually, this is the last thing you want to do. Because once you done it, your site goes down right away and your new shiny IIS 7 site will come up in... well, not sure yet. In my case, it is 5 days and counting. More...

Running public web site from your basement is unprofessional. I know that. For a couple years I'm running my own internet facing toy server at home as a sandbox project. Let me tell you - I'm still working on that 99.99999% uptime. 5-6 times a year my house loosing power, sometimes it comes back right away but it doesn't matter - server is going down and patiently awaiting me coming back from work. This alone means realistically 40-50 hours downtime a year. Sometimes it looks like my ISP goes down, too (may be he also running from the basement?) and I have to reset router to be able to connect again. Yet dependency on external DNS (I use DYNDns). And don't forget that you'll need to maintain it, patch, upgrade software, install new stuff with many-many reboots when you counting it year long. All that put together, and you got totally unreliable site that is constantly, chronically down. More...

This weekend I worked on incorporating one of the patches uploaded by Phil Garcia (thanks Phil!) that added SQL Server support to Extension Manager. Now you can pick your provider as usual and, if MS SQL Server is your provider, Extension Manager will persist settings to the database rather than XML file as it does by default. Personally, I don't use SQL provider for my blog; I'm totally satisfied with XML here. But I realize there are lot of people who feel differently about it and for whom database is a must. So I used this occasion as an opportunity to add test site to my hosting account and set it up to use SQL instead of XML to be able to try it in hosting environment. More...

As you can read on official site, BlogEngine does support Ajax. The approach it uses - it relays on few simple helper JavaScript routines (can be found in BlogEngine.Core/Web/Scripts/blog.js) and hand-crafter JavaScript functions in the UI code to perform basic callbacks. BlogEngine does not support Ajax.Net (aka Atlas or ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions in its latest incarnation) out of the box, and for a good reason. Ajax.Net is a dependent technology. You can't just throw Ajax DLLs in the /Bin folder and hope it will work - most likely it won't. The reason is that Microsoft's Ajax libraries require full trust to run, and if this is fine on your local machine, where you can grant yourself all rights in the world, your host might (and should) be far less generous. More...

That is amazing how easy it is to fix any problem as soon as it gets to the status of the ex-problem. After I found the way to make my email work on GoDaddy with their Form Mailer, I took another look at SMTP and sure enough all peaces readily fall into place. Here is step-by-step instruction on how to setup and use SMTP with GoDaddy – the way God intended. More...

Remember those lazy days when you could kick your trustworthy CDONTS mail messages from anywhere inside juicy spaghetti code and it just worked? Well, those days are over. Even 1.x’s System.Web.Mail – also not a brainier to use – is outdated and big no-no our days.

Now we supposed to use [W:SMTP]. And sometimes this beast just refuses to cooperate. Complete showstopper. I’m not a quitter, but I’m not going to spend countless hours googling around for the fix either (although, I admit, it is kind of addictive). So after short hunt, when first four or five “guaranteed” solutions did not work out I started looking for workaround. More...